Posts Tagged ‘marxism’

I was chilling at my very own facebook-profile today, and came over my quotes. And I saw the following:

“Anyone with time on their hands can hatch elaborate schemes for a better future, just as anyone can sketch endless plans for a magnificent novel they never get around to writing because they are endlessly sketching plans for it. The point for Marx is not to dream of an ideal future, but to resolve the contradictions in the present which prevent a better future from coming about.” – Terry Eagleton

Which reminded me of a book I read a while ago, called “Why Marx was right” by Terry Eagleton.

It is a brilliant book. It takes on 10 objections or misconceptions about Marxism which exist today, like how Marxists are historical determinists, how we reduce everything to the economic, how Marxism inevitably leads to political tyranny and such. Terry shows why these views on Marxism are wrong and why Marx was, in fact, correct in many of his analyses and why we should all be Marxists today. You should read it. It looks like this:

Burnie posted this awesome blogpost, concerning one of the big questions for us revolutionaries. Revolution vs Parlamentarism? If you haven’t read it yet, mozy on over there. I’ll wait for you.

This got me thinking, and rather than writing this in a comment, I feel like putting it into a blog entry.

The revolutionary socialist parties that exist today are small. Well, obviously that differs, but despite how Karl Marx predicted that the socialist movement would be strongest in the countries where capitalism had evolved furtherst (I think it’s safe to say that Norway falls under this category), in the most advanced countries the marxist parties are so small as to barely count for anything. Obviously, Marx was no magician so he couldn’t predict shitdicks like Stalin and Pol Pot messing with his beautiful words, but that’s for another blog entry.

With that in mind, i return to the question I am trying to answer, which Burnie so neatly presented: why are political movements with the end goal of breaking capitalism and establishing a new, more demoractic system, bothering with parliamentary work on the premises of the very system we want changed?

No one can predict when a revolutionary situation arises. When the october-revolution in Russia 1917 started, Lenin was in Europe. He thought it would happen there, and did not think the revolution would come to his homeland anytime soon. Suddenly he got word that the proletariat was marching in the streets, throwing the Tsar! (really, really simplified version, but this is a blog entry not an article for a history-book)

The point of this nice little story, is that you can never predict when a revolutionary situation arises, it can happen quickly, out of the blue. If the socialist party is so small that no one notices it when the revolution comes, there is a chance that the bourgeoisie might stop the revolution, and cling on to their broken system. Or even worse, the revolution might go the other way, and send fascists and nazis into power (nazism is back in europe, another topic for another blog entry).

We do parliamentary elections in order to gain followers, activists and to make people know who we are. So that when the revolution comes, we are strong enough to pull it through and usher in an eara of peace, freedom and everything for free! (sounds better in Norwegian)

I was going to put something in about elections and remnants of parliamentarism after the revolution, but that is yet another topic for yet another entry. So conclusion: parliamentary work is important, as long as we don’t forget the revolutionary ideology by which we swear by. This happens to most parties, they get eaten by the system and forget about socialism. We fight on in our beautiful party because we believe that we will not.

Thanks for your time! Here is an awesome picture of a unicorn, to lessen the wall of text and because data shows that our readers love politics and unicorns: